MasterClass Mira Nair Teaches Independent Filmmaking

With a career that highlights the lives of those “in between”—from street children to the culturally marginalized—Oscar-nominated director Mira Nair approaches filmmaking with the “heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.” 

Spurred on by rejection, she’s fought to illuminate untold stories and voices since her career began as a documentary filmmaker in the late 1970s. Her first feature film, Salaam Bombay!, landed an Academy Award nomination and her Golden Lion for Monsoon Wedding made her the first Indian woman to win the Venice Film Festival’s prize for best movie. 

Mira Nair furthered her fight to bring new stories and new perspectives to the film industry in 2004 by founding a free film school in Uganda to train and launch new, diverse talent. The Maisha Film Lab’s mantra follows Mira’s oft-repeated sentiment: “If we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will.” 

Mira Nair’s MasterClass on independent filmmaking will teach you to embrace the power in your own roots, to refine and develop your unique voice and style, to create cinematically rich films with limited resources, to elicit powerful emotional performances from actors and non-actors, to effectively lead a set, to build your creative community, and to protect and maintain your creative vision.

Through 17 video lessons and a customized workbook tailored to each chapter, Mira teaches you to:

• Find your most powerful idea

• Refine your unique voice as a filmmaker

• Draw the best from actors, professional or not

• Effectively run a set and lead a crew

• Strategically select locations

• Choose the most powerful action scenes 

• Build a bank of valuable imagery

• Take advantage of “cheap time”

• Thoughtfully approach production and costume design

• Incorporate sound and music that elevates

• Preserve the authenticity of your story and still resonate with wider audiences

Instant Download Only
Format file 17x MP4 720p
duration 4 hours 31 minutes
Release Oct 2020